What We're Blogging About

This article was originally published on IndustryWeek’s IdeaXchange blog, August 16th, 2017. Forget your wand and book of spells? No problem. You can bring magic (of a sort) to your floor without any supernatural assistance. Read more

Project Go-Live was a success. The MES system is up and running, on schedule and on budget. End users are starting to see the projected results, the key information that will move them further along the road to world-class manufacturing. Not to mention, deliver a healthy ROI on their investment. Time to move on? Not a chance. Now it’s time for knowledge transfer It’s never easy to transfer knowledge, and Read More

IIOT technology has evolved to the point that self-serve solutions are easier to configure, with your own display mash-ups and data analytics. Who needs that data scientist? Or system designer? No one! Uh oh, not so fast. There’s a flipside to this build-your-own-world. You still need good design and data management to make the content meaningful. But now, that role has been pushed out to the end user. The flexibility Read More

Mandarin and Spanish are the world’s two leading languages, based on numbers of native speakers. Mighty English can claim only 3rd place. However, English is by far the most prominent second language. Millions of people, in every country on Earth, choose to learn English because it’s the lingua franca of business. As a Costa Rican software engineer, I see myself as having two native languages, Spanish and Technology. But to Read More

Let’s say you’ve had your dog Woofgang for quite a while. You probably know how to interpret what Woofy is saying. His behavior tells you if his water bowl is empty, it’s time to go outside, or it’s been too long since the last run. But sometimes you fail in your interpretation, there’s a communication breakdown, and you come upon the unhappy result on your new Persian carpet. Uh oh! Read More

The big divide – with solutions for bridging it Today I’m writing about the big divide in our society – the polarization that everyone’s talking about. The one that makes it tough for all of us to see eye to eye. You know the one I mean! The divide between manufacturing and IT people, on every shop floor. Joking aside … to have success in any manufacturing project, one of Read More

The 2017 PTC LiveWorx event in Boston, from which I’ve just returned, was something to see. If you’re a current SCADA developer – say Siemens, GE or Schneider – you should be watching. And worried. LiveWorx has been building out a technology stack that allows seamless usage of PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) content across all elements of manufacturing. They’re now launching their next-gen IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) PLM platform Read More

This article was originally published on IndustryWeek’s IdeaXchange blog, June 2nd, 2017. You might have noticed a comment was made on the first article in this series: I didn’t mention the ‘why’ as a KSF in bringing home a machine learning project. And it’s true, forgetting the why is a serious problem. As the commenter noted: Unless there’s a why and a businessperson involved, all you’ve got is a handicapped specialty Read More

A common criticism of IT people is their over-focus on technology. Typically, this is coupled with an under-focus on user needs and long-term business goals. This can mean that the IT team is focusing on solving problems that are not a priority for the user and or C-suite. How do we effectively translate or quantify the handful of business goals of the user into the hundreds of requirements given to Read More

This article was originally published on IndustryWeek’s IdeaXchange blog, March 27th 2017. The very bright daughter of a friend of mine — I’ll call her Hannah — grew up with the Harry Potter series. Eight years old when the first book came out and an avid reader, Hannah looked forward to each new volume with painful anticipation. Now 27, Hannah recently confided to her mother that in the days before her Read More